Why Is Trump Trying to Fire This Museum Director?

Yahoo

14 hours ago

DONALD TRUMP'S ANNOUNCEMENT in a May 30 Truth Social post that he had fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, on the grounds of supposed partisanship and commitment to 'DEI'—diversity, equity, and inclusion—has been the latest salvo in his fight to remake America's elite cultural institutions. But this time, the attack has foundered, as Trump lacks the legal authority to dismiss Sajet or hire her replacement—although you can bet that administration lawyers are looking for legal theories to legitimize Trump's action, or applying pressure on those actually empowered to fire her
So far, Sajet, a 60-year-old Dutch art historian with a long career in American and Australian art museums who became the National Portrait Gallery's first female director in 2013, is reportedly still at her desk. The gallery's website still lists her as director, and its press releases give no inkling of any turmoil at the museum. The Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, of which the gallery is a part—and to which the task of hiring its directors is by law reserved—held an emergency meeting this past Monday to discuss the situation; one of its four regular annual in-person meetings is scheduled for Monday of next week. For now, everyone at the Smithsonian and at the National Portrait Gallery is maintaining a media silence. (Queries from The Bulwark have gone unanswered.)
While the Smithsonian was created by Congress, gets two-thirds of its funding from the federal government, and has such a close relationship with the government that it enjoys certain kinds of legal special treatment, it is not an executive branch agency. (The seventeen-person Board of Regents always includes, by law, several members of Congress, the vice president, and the chief justice of the United States, who by tradition is usually elected chancellor of the Smithsonian.) As is inevitable in a museum as large as the Smithsonian and covering the subjects that it does, it has faced political controversies and pressures through the years. However, as Philip Kennicott points out, if Trump succeeds in ousting Sajet, this would drastically change the institution's status: all of the content and personnel decisions in its nineteen museums—seventeen in Washington, D.C. and two in New York—would fall directly under White House control.
But leaving aside the issue of legal authority, there's also the question of Kulturkampf: What's really driving Trump's 'war on woke' in cultural institutions and what is it meant to accomplish? Right-wing critics have portrayed Sajet as an ideologue who, according to New Criterion executive editor James Panero, has 'shown contempt for the National Portrait Gallery's collection' and focused on 'politicized exhibitions.' The White House, meanwhile, has been touting a list of seventeen alleged transgressions by Sajet, from donations to Democratic politicians to past comments in favor of broader racial and cultural representation in art.
But while Sajet's public statements and her stewardship of the gallery certainly suggest she shares the progressive sensibilities that tend to be standard in the art world, they also show that she is very far from being a militant ideologue or hostile to the gallery's collection. Are some of her choices and policies open to reasonable criticism? Of course. But much of the right-wing criticism directed at Sajet is far more ideological and intolerant than any of the offenses imputed to her—particularly considering that those offenses include an entirely accurate label for a portrait of Donald Trump.
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LET'S START WITH THAT LABEL, which various sources quote as follows:
Impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials. After losing to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump mounted a historic comeback in the 2024 election. He is the only president aside from Grover Cleveland (1837–1908) to have won a nonconsecutive second term.
The White House apparently thinks this text exposes the blatant hypocrisy of Sajet's statement that 'we try very much not to editorialize' and that the labels in the gallery's American Presidents permanent exhibition should be based on 'historical fact,' not the 'curator's opinion.' But where's the lie? The above quote is solidly based on historical fact. Moreover, it's also not the entirety of the label, which The Guardian has described as 'delicately crafted.' The supposedly incendiary part is preceded by a remarkably—you could even say, undeservedly—positive writeup:
After a long career in business and television, Donald J. Trump overcame a crowded primary field to win the Republican Party's nomination and the 2016 election. His campaign slogan, 'Make America Great Again' (MAGA), has come to signify his supporters and his political agenda.
During his first term, Trump appointed a record number of federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices. He brokered a series of agreements between Israel and several Arab nations, focused on immigration policy, and reduced government regulations. He also promoted the development of COVID-19 vaccines while making economic prosperity a key priority.
If anything, I'd say the gallery was bending over backwards not to editorialize, with the effect of making Trump seem far more normal than he is. (Even a purely factual summary could have been far worse: There's no mention, for instance, of the fact that Trump is the first U.S. president to have been convicted of a felony or found civilly liable for sexual assault.) For what it's worth, the National Portrait Gallery label for Bill Clinton also acknowledges his impeachment for denying his sexual relationship with an intern while under oath. One could quibble with some of the other labels—read them for yourself—but overall, they simply don't show the blatant bias Sajet's detractors claim.
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What about Sajet's supposed excessive commitment to diversity? She has drawn fire for a policy requiring, in her own words, that '50 percent of all the funds we would spend should go to a minority subject or artist,' a definition that apparently includes women. While such decisions don't constitute illegal discrimination, quotas are always counterproductive.
Sajet has made no secret of her commitment to countering the image of the National Portrait Gallery as a showcase for 'the wealthy, the pale and the male.' But while this phrase may have fit the gallery's early years—of the 161 portrait subjects in its 1968 opening exhibition, all but eight were men and all but eight were white—it had already come a long way from those stodgy beginnings well before Sajet's tenure. Its 2007–08 exhibitions included four eighteenth-century portraits of Native American leaders, twentieth-century photographs of notable American women, and a tribute to hip-hop.
Did Sajet's efforts to amount an overcorrection? Many of her 'diverse' projects would raise no eyebrows except in the truly fetid corners of far-right Twitter: for instance, the 2020 'Votes for Women' exhibition on the suffrage movement, or the 2019–20 tribute to black singer and civil rights icon Marian Anderson. Others sound ill-conceived: for instance, much of the 2015–22 series of social justice-focused performance art events, Identify, seems heavy-handed or gimmicky. (That said: we're talking about a total of eleven events spread out over seven years.) One may also deplore lapses into grating left-coded academic or activist jargon of the sort that refers to people from traditionally disenfranchised groups as 'bodies.'
On the other hand, some of the attacks on Sajet either attribute a nefarious radicalism to even the most moderate acknowledgments of the darker aspects of American history (e.g., her remark at the 2018 Atlantic festival that 'the 'portrait of America' has never been only about meritocracy but also social access, racial inequality, gender difference, religious preference and political power') or plainly misrepresent the content at the gallery. Thus, the New Criterion's Panero claims that the 2018–19 exhibition Unseen, featuring work by two artists critiquing the treatment (or exclusion) of race in traditional American portraiture, 'depict[s] the symbolic destruction of historical portraits in the permanent collection' and thus demonstrates Sajet's scorn for the museum's historical fare.
Unseen was certainly a politically charged exhibition, although some of its messages—e.g., subverting mythologized or idealized notions of Thomas Jefferson or Christopher Columbus—were arguably pretty cliché by 2019. But the painting by Titus Kaphar in which a curtain with a famous Jefferson portrait is pulled back to reveal an image of a presumably enslaved black woman is actually quite striking, and it doesn't depict the 'destruction' of anything. (If Panero is referring to a partly sliced-up image of Andrew Jackson—another work by Kaphar—that image recreates a portrait installed in the Oval Office during Trump's first term, apparently not a painting in the National Portrait Gallery collection.) Other parts of the exhibition juxtaposed busts and life masks of people from American and European elites with busts of African Americans and Native Americans in a way that conveyed equal humanity, not destruction.
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More importantly: One doesn't have to like Unseen (which was underwritten by private foundation grants). But to suggest that it did not deserve a place in the National Portrait Gallery smacks of—say it with me—cancel culture. The backlash would be understandable if Sajet really had declared war on the gallery's regular collection and filled most of the available space with 'subversive' and activist progressive art. She has not.
A look at current and past exhibitions under Sajet's tenure shows such subjects as antebellum portraits of West Point cadets; 'namesakes' of Washington, D.C. streets and avenues; Abraham Lincoln's contemporaries; early daguerreotype photos; charcoal portraits by John Singer Sargent; and tributes to the lives and careers of such varied American figures as Will Rogers, Sylvia Plath, Arnold Palmer, Nancy Reagan, Babe Ruth, John McCain, and Tom Wolfe. The ongoing exhibition Out of Many: Portraits from 1600 to 1900 still offers a reassuringly old-fashioned gallery of painting, busts, and nineteenth-century photographs of men and women as varied as Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Edison—along with lesser-known but fascinating figures such as eighteenth-century revolutionary gazetteer Anne Catherine Hoof Green and nineteenth-century American-British black actor and playwright Ira Aldridge. There's also a four-year loan, running from 2023 to 2027, of a life-size 1865 painting of Abraham Lincoln by W.F.K. Travers. When the installation was announced, Sajet spoke enthusiastically of 'reunit[ing] the Travers painting with Gilbert Stuart's Lansdowne portrait of George Washington' with which it was displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.
In other words, the gallery's traditional content is still very much alive, well, and treated with respect and affection, not contempt.
And if one may quibble with some of its more political content in recent years, some of the charges levied against Sajet by the right are far more blatantly and ham-fistedly political—for instance, the complaint about the gallery's display of Planned Parenthood's founder Margaret Sanger. Some of Sanger's views, such as support for the sterilization of people with mental disabilities, are today rightly considered repugnant, but she was a complex and important figure in American history.
Last but not least: Also on the White House's list of seventeen supposed offenses Sajet has committed is 'a social media post praising Anthony Fauci,' honored at the National Portrait Gallery in 2022.
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WE STILL DON'T KNOW EXACTLY WHY Trump decided to sack Sajet. His Truth Social post referred to acting 'upon the request and recommendation of many people.' Sajet's name may have been the first suggested for the chopping block by Lindsey Halligan, Trump's former defense attorney whom he has made a special assistant tasked with sniffing out 'improper ideology' in the Smithsonian. Sajet may have been in the sights of right-wing militants who saw her a symbol of the pervasive 'woke' dominance in cultural institutions, a dominance many on the right see as so insidious that it must be broken up by government muscle.
It's also entirely possible that the real issue was just the label on the Trump portrait—which would be very much in line with Trump's ego-obsessed, vindictive, petty narcissism.
As with the rest of Trump's self-serving anti-DEI crusade, looking for valid points in the charges leveled against Sajet is irrelevant: The real point is the power grab. Which is why, even if progressive culture can produce its own variants of conformity, everyone who values artistic freedom should be standing with Kim Sajet right now—and hoping that the gallery won't join the ranks of institutions that have caved to Trump. Otherwise, we may end up with a National Portrait Gallery where the text label that comes with Trump's portrait will simply say, 'GREATEST PRESIDENT EVER.'
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